A Faster Vim For A Better manpager

18 Jun 2016

I’ve been using Vim as a man pager for a long time and I love it! I
used this guide by Zameer Manji
for setting it up. However, the load times are anything but impressive
when compared to the default less pager. I use a considerable amount
of simple plugins and autocommands, which can result in this problem. I
use vim-plug for managing plugins, and it provides a way to load
plugins based on file types. This improves the startup time quite a bit
in the normal case (where I don’t load heavier plugins like
YouCompleteMe).

Tip: If you’re planning to learn Vim, using it as a manpager is a very
good idea. This will avoid the dip in productivity that comes with a
text-editor switch, and at the same time, give a reasonable time for
trying out various Vim commands

I noticed a way to make the load time of Vim faster for man paging
without manually blacklisting plugins. The vim option of --noplugin
ensures that no plugin gets loaded. Here are the results when measured
with --startuptime command line option: